[HackSoc] Cascadia regional hacking skill share

Tue Apr 26 01:23:07 MDT 2005

Hi hackingsociety,

Last weekend I went to a hacking skill share and wrote up a report for
those who might be interested. If you're not interested, feel free to
delete now.

Intro
=====
Here in Seattle I am part of a local hacking society group. About 1.5
years ago we started having regional hacking skill share weekends with
other groups that we knew about in Portland and Vancouver, BC. Every
3-4 months we hold and event and we rotate hosting them. Last weekend
we had an event in Vancouver. This was our 6th weekend so far and we
had between 15-20 participants most of the time.

General structure
=================
Friday:
  socializing, eating, hiking, sightseeing, etc.
  brainstorm list of topics for the weekend
Saturday morning: Show-and-tell, these are 15min sessions when people
  present topics that they want to share and the group wants to learn
  about.  Other conferences sometimes call these Lightning talks. We
  did 8-9 topics and it took about 2.5 hours. People always go over and
  discussions happen so we usually leave some extra time for that.
Saturday afternoon and all day Sunday: Extended hacking sessions
  We picked topics from the show-and-tell that people were excited
  about and then did extended 2 hour sessions on those. We ran two
  tracks in parallel and tried to optimize to minimize conflicts
  (which is hard to do, we decided we want some software that can
  do this for us, let us know if you write it).

Some meals were eaten out, some were collectively cooked. Most of the
time there was also stuff around to snack on as well, and a big coffee
pot and other drinks.

Topics
======
Here's my notes on what I remember. I obviously can't give you as much
info as the talks but maybe enough to interest you in researching for
yourself.

Linux VServers
You may be familiar with
  VMware: emulates a whole system and lets you run whole operating
    system images, bootloader kernel and all
  Xen: emulates a whole system and lets you run whole operating
    system images, but doesn't have to emulate at the low level that
    VMware does and doesn't suffer as much performance loss
  User Mode Linux: lets you run whole Linux OS images each with their
    own potentially slightly different kernel
  chroot: lets you run whole Linux userspace OS images in their own
    protected process space, using the host kernel
Linux vservers live in between a simple chroot and something larger
 that is emulating the whole system. vservers are each their own Linux
 OS userspace image running in their own process space and can use
 things like network adapters, disks, and other devices. vservers all
 run under the same kernel and use kernel capabilities to restrict the
 kinds of things that they can do. The presenter explained how
 vservers are setup, how to use the userspace tools to manipulate them,
 and some strategies on managing them.
http://linux-vserver.org/

Ruby on Rails
 Ruby is a smalltalk like language (ask erics for a braindump if you
  like). Rails is a framework for writing web applications in ruby.
  Apparently all the super 133t web developers are using it and they've
  imparted their collective knowledge about "the right way to do
  things" into it. So this makes it easy to throw together really
  powerful high quality web applications quickly. The presenters
  demo'd a few things they had done with it and walked through
  building a simple site.
 http://www.ruby-lang.org/
 http://www.rubyonrails.org/
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_on_Rails

AJAX aka XML-RPC
  "It's remote procedure calling using HTTP as the transport and XML as
  the encoding. XML-RPC is designed to be as simple as possible, while
  allowing complex data structures to be transmitted, processed and
  returned."
 IMO the win here is that you can have web apps that are more
 interactive/responsive on the browser and load data behind the scenes,
 thus not requiring page loads for each thing you click.
 Examples of applications using this,
 Google suggest: offers suggested search terms as you type
  http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en
 GMail: mail interface runs on the browser, transfers the data it needs
   without interrupting the UI
 Google Maps: lets you dynamically manipulate the map, loads map
   "tiles" in the background
 The presenters demo'd some sites and showed a jukebox type
 application they wrote which allowed users to control it without doing
 page loads. One interesting thing they pointed out is that users have
 gotten so used to pages reloading they don't realize that their
 clicks have taken an effect. This is causing some interesting UI
 design discussions.
 http://www.xmlrpc.com/
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX

munin
 "Munin is a tool for graphing all sorts of information about one or
 more servers and displaying it in a web interface."
 Like mrtg but nicer and easy to add plug-ins. The presenter demo'd
 their setup including some additional python scripts they wrote to
 consolidate similar graphs for a bunch of hosts on the same page
 for comparison purposes.
 http://www.linpro.no/projects/munin/
  check the "examples" link for eye candy

wrt54g hacking
 This was a hands on workshop hacking on Linksys wrt54g wireless
 routers. We experimented with flashing alternative firmware
 images on the devices and talked about the state of development
 of various efforts. In particular the openwrt.org folks have built
 a pretty nice system. It consists of a base that comes with ipkg
 (a dpkg clone for embedded systems, also used by the people hacking
 ipaqs) and this lets you download packages and easily create a
 custom solution.
 Other things discussed were nocatauth and wifidog (both wireless
 portal tools), WDS (wireless distribution system, a feature for
 connecting access points together), OLSR (Optimized Link State
 Routing Protocol, used for creating wireless meshes), and how to
 use a jtag cable to recover your wrt54g if you manage to "brick it".
 http://www.linksysinfo.org/
 http://openwrt.org/
 http://nocat.net/ 
 http://www.ilesansfil.org/wiki/WiFiDog
 http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3626.html
 http://openwrt.org/OpenWrtDocs/Troubleshooting

cfengine
 "Cfengine, or the configuration engine is an autonomous agent and a
 middle to high level policy language and agent for building expert
 systems to administrate and configure large computer networks."
 The presenter showed off the work they had done to use cfengine to
 maintain a large collection of systems. This involved explaining
 where the tool and it's config files live on the systems and walking
 through the config files and explaining all the rules that had been
 setup for the various different services. In addition to maintaining
 config files there were lots of other examples like using it to
 maintain package install state, restart crashed services, deploying
 freshly installed systems, and other super useful stuff. Everyone
 maintaining a bunch of systems should be using this.
 Another interesting note: the Custom Debian Distributions people
 are using a combination of cfengine and low-priority debconf
 config questions as a way for their users to maintain a bunch of
 custom systems.
 http://www.cfengine.org/

Encrypted Filesystems
 A skill-share on how to effectively use encrypted filesystems.
 Participants compared notes on how they are using this, things
 like how to encrypt different filesystems (normal, raid, swap, etc)
 and how to use keys and passphrases. (I didn't get to attend this
 one).

VOIP and Asterisk
 A demo on some implementing some cool features in Asterisk for a
 net radio station.
  1) A call queue system for people calling the station. Selections
  included things like "go live on the air", "talk to someone",
  "listen to the radio stream", and "leave a message".
  2) A support queue system that attempts to call each of the support
  people until it gets someone. The order it calls in is based on who
  most recently answered a support call, once you field a call you
  get moved to the end of the list.

I think it would be cool if the Colorado chapters started doing
similar events.

-- 
Matt Taggart
matt at lackof.org